


Storm

by mechafly



Category: Ookiku Furikabutte | Big Windup!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-31 01:22:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3959119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mechafly/pseuds/mechafly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You are just so lucky you've got Akimaru." </p><p>Haruna has never learned the trick of it, getting a girl to like you back. So many people have liked him first, he doesn't know how to do it the other way around. He hopes that in this case, constant exposure does the trick.</p><p>It's worked with Akimaru, who's his closest real point of reference anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Storm

Haruna heaves awake.

Kaiju-- Jaeger-- ocean--

A bed next to his. White hospital mattress. Akimaru's white arm dangling. A wire trickles from it. 

Breathing, though. Alive.

Both of them, still alive. 

Things just got complicated.

 

 

"The Jaeger's alright." Miyashita's round penny face turned downturned. "Plasma rifle in disuse. Left leg unrecoverable." A thrill from thigh to calf where his brain registered the kaiju's claws in the Jaeger's mechanical limb in his own. "Maintenance work will begin in a week. But. You. High Command…" 

The battle has left him wiped, a blank slate. The truth comes trickling out. No more missions. They--Haruna and Akimaru--have fucked up one time too many. 

Fact. The kaiju, the third-largest ever on record, tosses their Jaeger across Kobe Bay like a doll. Goes on a rampage on south China.

Oceans, bodies, one step closer to extinction. His thoughts scramble.

Miyashita's eyes are round when she turns up a dial on the monitor. Drug. His vein. Haruna wants to tell her not to be afraid. "Sleep," her red mouth commands.

 

 

It's possible he spends years floating beside Akimaru. That ragged brown hair, that small downturned mouth. Akimaru's face is naked without the glasses. In the work of a blink, he sees himself, through Akimaru's eyes. A dark sneering face embedded with two black monster eyes. Akimaru tastes him bitter and thick. Haruna.

Haruna could reach out with his hand, but Akimaru would remain as far away as the unborn kaiju at the centre of the Earth, quickening in dark lava wombs, hurrying to reclaim their world.

 

 

 

Akimaru returns to them. A yawn stretches his capable, relaxed body in a tactile arch. The Drift has always gone very easy on Akimaru.

Haruna sits at his bedside like a giant crab. "No more missions." That's his voice, Haruna. 

Akimaru, he--hums; sighs; laments; thanks God he's alive; plans for the future. Reaches over to touch his hand. Haruna whips it away.

"It must be a relief for you." Haruna's smiling. Akimaru does not smile back. "No more missions. No more putting your life at risk. You can look forward to retirement. Minor celebrity. So… peaceful."

Akimaru looks at him, guileless blue eyes. "Haruna, anyone would feel that way. Nobody enjoys war." A long silence, hands on a blue cotton blanket. Akimaru's hands, stubby and strong. "We couldn't have done it forever. Fighting those kaiju. They were getting bigger and bigger." Akimaru nods, firmly. "Leave it to the government, eh?"

"The government's stupid." Haruna's hands fist. "Leave it to the government? The government's going to fuck us all over!" They hear footsteps stopping outside the clinic door.

Akimaru fixes him with a firm gaze, him, Haruna. "Not our problem. We're just two people. High Command happens to think we've done enough."

"It won't be enough until all the kaiju are gone."

Akimaru reaches over to touch his hand; is rebuffed once more. His expression is beseeching, sarcastic, loving. "Well… that's just not going to happen, now is it?"

Haruna stands and walks out, past Miyashita and Ookawa quickly looking occupied next to the door, away from Akimaru's face turned away. A hand going carefully over his face, blocking out light and errant thoughts.

 

 

 

The kaiju is a giant. They are like an ant staring up at a boot. 

The first rule of piloting a Jaeger is, don't die in vain. Take the kaiju with you. You have your weapons, your strength. Your courage. 

No self-destruct device, though. The Jaeger parts scavenged from the ocean, years after their pilots are dead, are too insanely valuable for that.

The kaiju screams at the Jaeger. It recognises the enemy.

Akimaru's mind freezes. Haruna yells to focus, but Akimaru doesn't focus, doesn't do anything. He doesn’t want to die, but if he does die, he doesn't want to be around for it. Doesn't want to bear the pain.

Chained to Akimaru's frozen synapses, Haruna fights as well as he can on his own, which is to say, not at all. 

Are you still there? He's chanting, as he dodges kaiju tooth, kaiju claw. Come out, come, wherever you are.

Silence. 

And then the roar of the ocean to welcome them in.

 

 

 

"You are just so lucky you've got Akimaru." 

Haruna has never learned the trick of it, getting a girl to like you back. So many people have liked him first, he doesn't know how to do it the other way around. He hopes that in this case, constant exposure does the trick.

It's worked with Akimaru, who's his closest real point of reference anyway.

"Ah, yeah." Miyashita smiles politely at him. Haruna thinks, she's going to think that you're an idiot. "Well, uh, Akimaru and I have known each other since we were kids."

"That's sweet. So when did you guys start dating?" 

"He's…" Haruna honest-to-God blushes. "Straight." He spends half his life sharing a mind with the man. He knows. 

Realises he's forgotten the important point, about himself, surely, of question to the girl he adores.

"Oh, I didn't mean to offend." Her smile is so charming that Haruna immediately falls over himself to not be offended. "I just assumed… you know, your Drift is a very… it's a very loving Drift." 

You have to enjoy Drift engineers, the way they humanise everything, even the brutal jamming together of unwelcome neurons, the sharp-metal-scream of the Drift.

Haruna lets her twitter on, miserably. Because it's true, successful Jaeger pilots fall into two categories: couples and relatives. There's this Australian father and son, veterans; those twins, based in Hong Kong but Japanese, teens but promising. And there's the Russian husband and wife, and that American couple. 

The rest are just ordinary people struggling along, likely to die before anyone takes notice of their efforts.

 

 

 

Akimaru is many things. Haruna's friend. Yes, his friend.

The first Drift together is… the summer sky when they were kids. So uncomplicated. Baseballs riddling the grass. No rough edges, nothing like the neuron-scratching Drifts Haruna has worked with his whole life. 

Hello.

Hi, you.

So this works.

It works.

Holy God.

Akimaru: a friend. 

Haruna squirrels out all of Akimaru's secrets in that first meeting of minds. Every locked up thought. Akimaru never wanted to be a Jaeger pilot. He would have happily lived out the rest of his days on this small base, engineering. 

Most of it's, Haruna. Haruna. Haruna. Every shared memory and shared touch rising up like air.

And Akimaru's not someone Haruna can trust to do or die. Not someone he can trust in the pilot's seat. Not someone he can trust with his life. 

In the end Akimaru's just an ordinary man.

 

 

 

Haruna shows promise in cadet school, that cesspit of Jaeger pilot hopefuls. They are children snagged by the dream of eternal fame in a world fast running out of a future. Haruna's big for his age, muscles and a mean stare in a fight, crocodile-smile and charm outside of it. The officers push him. There's no time. One extra Drift, another, another. Find a Drift partner, train to save the world. He's got the second down, but not the first. And what Haruna wants more than anything in life is to save the world. Just one more. He's only thirteen.

He wakes up in a hospital ward after blackouts and months of irrational, mind-bending terror, sick dreams, blood leaking out of his eyes.

Years of neural rehabilitation, alone. You don't bother with the cadets who as likely as anything to end up as vegetables. There's a world to save. Bring on the next big hero.

 

 

 

"I wanted to be a Jaeger pilot originally." 

Haruna hears this a lot. A lesser man might be irritated, but Haruna's always curious.

"So what happened?"

Ookawa is their head of mechanics. Good at what he does, but not great, not to be stuck in a lifetime job working on a small Japanese base in the Osaka region. The best of the country's pilots and engineers go to Alaska, Hong Kong, Sydney bay. 

Ookawa, a shiny wide face and tombstone-like teeth. He's totally happy to be mediocre. The entire base struck lucky the day they'd found a partner for Haruna. 

Ookawa bellows a laugh. "I got fat and old! And I was better at making the weapons than waving them around." It's a familiar story. "Hey, you remember Splicer Rocket? No? It was the first of the nuclear Jaegers. German-Japanese engineering and an American paintjob. Truly epic." 

Epic, legendary, Trojan, prime, Gundam. The nerdy vocabulary of the committed mechahead. Haruna rolls his eyes, but Ookami protests. "It beat five kaiju off the coast of Australia that year! Five."

"Who were the pilots?" Haruna doesn’t have a head for the machines, not really; just the people inside them.

Ookami scratches his balding head. "Chinese couple. Died the year after, I think, taking down those winged type threes. They were heroes." He crosses himself religiously.

This is how pilots are remembered. Remembered, because they always die; but in general terms, because they die so fast. That couple. Heroes. Those triplets. Heroes. How are people going to remember him and Akimaru? 

That odd pair. 

Heroes. (Maybe.)

Haruna doesn't remember the couple in question. He'd been so very small when the first generation of Jaegers came out, and they were already hopelessly outdated by the time he struggling through in cadet school. Outdated heroes, outdated saviours, for a humankind looking elsewhere for its future.

 

 

Haruna's first successful Drift partner comes after a long rehabilitation, a long retraining, a long despair. He's young. But at least Haruna understands the world, what is is. How easily it can cast you out. 

One of the cadets is this pipsqueak. He is barely old enough to have graduated from ordinary high school, let alone military school for the biggest war ever waged. And somehow, the Drift works. 

Abe Takaya is his name. Sad eyes. And it seems like Takaya, all numbers and insane ambition, makes himself Drift compatible with Haruna out of sheer bloody-minded determination. Takaya's mind tastes like cold steel and raw heart.

Haruna doesn't do the right thing. 

Perhaps it's his own fear and pain, after helplessness and sheer terror, mental trauma that leads him to behave as he does. He's like a tiger going after someone who's been baiting it with a stick. Perhaps it's after-effects of bad Drifting that will always leave their ugly scares in Haruna's brain, like the anger that still occasionally savages him during an ordinary day of ordinary happiness.

He acts insane. Can't focus on fighting the simulated kaiju, or he focuses on fighting but hurts Takaya in the process. Or himself. Can't keep a lid on the violence. Part of him takes a sick pleasure in all of it. And the Drift, it's sick, and so good. Swallowing down Takaya's pain and confusion for himself. Takaya's so, so young. He doesn't understand a thing.

Takaya gets out first. 

And now Haruna doesn't know where he is, that Abe Takaya. Manning a tiny leftover station somewhere. Running an emergency control room on some base. Darkness and obscurity. 

Could be, that's all that's left for any of them.

 

 

 

MAKE A SITUATION

"You got scaly duty for an hour." It's Kaguyan, Kaguyama Hiroki. He's the closest in age to Haruna out of all the cadets, only a year his senior, enough that they don't stand on formality. In the official parlance, one might say that they have a rapport. 

Also, Kaguyan is tiny and sort of hilarious, like a… a… really small, cheerful squirrel. He's another marooned cadet, dreaming of piloting. He mostly does biomechanical engineering on kaiju instead. 

Haruna groans. "Switch with me? I get so creeped out by those guys getting boners over… bits and pieces of kaiju. It's creepy, you know?"

"Hey, I'm one of those guys!"

"It's creepy, dude."

Kaguyan wags a finger. "Think about it. Some people, not naming names, love Jaegers. But the kaiju are even bigger, awesomer, crazier. I used to collect kaiju training cards as a kid." 

"How can you hope to fight kaiju if you're so in love with them?!"

Putting aside Haruna's rebellious mutters, Kaguyan continues. "There's something enticing to humans about the possibility of their own end, you know? The vision of a power that big and undeafeatable, able to wipe away your life at a single hand. Isn't it the same fascination, as people used to have with God?"

That's something Akimaru would have said, 'a fascination with God', he thinks. Except, Akimaru would have said, 'a fascination with yourself, that's what you have, thinking you're God.' Maybe that's true.

The old saying goes, the kaiju are the instruments of God's wrath. And why Japan first, the saying continues. Because we' are a nation of sin and unnatural appetites, and we must be punished. Well. When God's instruments are beating down your shores and smashing your skyscrapers, it's difficult to argue the point.

Still. Haruna has issues with this new God of their new century. It's like that story of the flood that he's always hated. Did they all have to die, except those couples on the boat? Couldn't they have built more ships and saved everyone? Or created a fire just as big as the flood, and steamed away all the water.

And then he has to think about the fact that Akimaru is gone.

 

 

 

Years of rehabilitation. Haruna sends himself to a base, back in Japan, just a temporary stopgap, to find an old friend. His brain hurts from existing, but existing is better than being a babbling crazy person like some cadet school graduates.

It's only then that anyone notices Akimaru exists. His old friend the totally hopeless pilot. Granted, a half-decent fighter.

Haruna likes Akimaru's crappy little base, for some God-awful reason. It's like a whole base of Akimarus, all naïve and a touch adorable (and more than a touch adoring). And it is good to speak Japanese again. He even takes the trip to visit his family, when Akimaru insists. It's… nice. Ordinary. Home-made dishes and fat baby cousins and grandparents. He feels like the wolf someone accidentally invited to dinner. 

Spars with Akimaru for the sake of familiarity, since all the other trained cadets on the base don't last a minute against him. Spars a lot, because he needs to keep up his strength. The matches are increasingly well-attended.

"Watching you two is like… a wet dream," Miyashita sighs at Haruna after half the whole base crowds in to watch a match.

"What-- what are you talking about??"

"You know, the way you… move together, in perfect unison, perfectly opposed--"

"--Hey, hey, that's just 'cause we went to the same martial arts academy--"

"--But it's amazing, how he can counter every one of your strikes, at the same speed. It's like he can read your mind." Haruna repeats pathetically that they went to the same school, that's it's just born of long association, long friendship and hundreds of thousands of matches together. "But you guys are totally focussed on one another, it's really… intense. I've never seen Akimaru like that before."

Haruna doesn't have much to say to that.

"Haven't you guys ever tried to Drift?"

Haruna looks at her flushed face with a blush creeping onto his own cheeks. A wet dream? He's been trying to elicit this reaction from Miyashita for months. All this blushing and generally falling all over herself. And now here it is, because of… him and Akimaru? Haruna concludes that he doesn't understand women. 

"Drift with Akimaru? Of course not! He's hopeless. Look, I know you're a Drift mechanic, but honestly I don't think Akimaru even passed the academy graduation exam for pilots. Seriously…" And so it continues.

But try they do.

And here they are.

 

 

 

 

Haruna calls up High Command on the vidscreen. Gets a curt dismissal for his efforts.

Haruna thinks of his hard work, lost now, since he'll never find a co-pilot like Akimaru. Since Akimaru doesn't want to be his co-pilot. Since Akimaru would rather live a human life, and die quiet.

They meet on the sparring mat. The tangle of cadets is already clearing to make way for them. Word spreads. It's been a while since they last sparred; they have the Drift these days, after all.

Akimaru, he doesn't attack Haruna. He dodges; he parries; he deflects a blow; he ducks; he slips away. Never once faltering, eyes intent on Haruna's body, he reads Haruna like ciphers, a trick of a code of muscles and nerves. 

The only way to stop Akimaru on the sparring mat if you're Haruna Motoki is to tire him out. Play the long game.

Akimaru relies on his natural fitness and a few bench-presses to get him through a fight. Haruna trains to prepare himself against God's instruments on the battlefield for the survival of humankind. He can play the long game against this one man.

That's the game Haruna plays. But it's Haruna who loses power and speed expending all these attacks, which in turn makes it easier for Akimaru to keep defending. 

They always call things to a halt. Bow. Go and shower. Part the crowds of cadets. Stalemate.

They won't talk to each other afterwards. The closeness of physical combat is too much. It will take time to sort through their thoughts. They will sit in silence and share the same air. Akimaru will rub the sore spots on Haruna's wrists or shoulders like they're his own, reading Haruna just as well at rest as he does in combat. 

 

 

 

This time, though. No Drift, no missions. Not much of anything left.

Haruna stalks into Akimaru's room afterwards and slams the door shut behind him.

Akimaru takes a look at him and seems resigned to getting a beating. He doesn't put up a fight when Haruna grabs him and slams him halfway across the room and onto the bed (he doesn't feel like giving Akimaru a concussion by slamming him into the floor). Akimaru winces but otherwise doesn’t even have the politeness to look scared, even though Haruna is so angry he's scaring himself.

"Not so cocky now, are you?" Haruna hisses. Akimaru looks like he's waiting for him to go on, but Haruna just shoves him against the mattress again. Akimaru doesn't do anything except let out a lungful of air, a forced exhale. His choppy brown hair flops all over the place. Akimaru thinks the retro short cut look works for him, and he won't hear anything the contrary. Haruna thinks he looks ridiculous.

And now Haruna is thinking about all the things he'd normally think about after a spar with Akimaru. Processing the memorised lines of Akimaru's body in his mind. His expression of clean concentration, his sharp eyes on Haruna's body. Their bodies. Their past bodies, awkward teenagers, tiny kids. A history of limbs. Their future bodies, old and wrinkled, hopefully, rather dead and picked clean at the bottom of the ocean or melting in a kaiju's neon belly. A future. Possibly.

Akimaru is thinking something of the same, the two of them pressed together like they are, because he sighs and rubs a firm hand along Haruna's back. Haruna drops a head on Akimaru's collarbone, his hair spilling messily on Akimaru's bare skin.

"Your back's tightened right up." Akimaru digs that hand right into a sore spot, soothing through the layer of muscle. "Your leg too." Now his hand is sliding down the wall of Haruna's back muscles to squeeze just below his ass, right on the tight muscle in question. "You always overdo it with the crazy lunges."

"Trying to get ahold of you," Haruna grunts. Akimaru's body fills his senses, his warmth and sweat, his hands. Being with Akimaru is mostly easy, almost too much so. Is it too easy, these roles they fall into around each other? They've been doing it since they were kids. It's like they were created to be this way. Akimaru reads Haruna's needs and he moves to fulfil them. Clockwork; internal combustion; mechanics.

He needs Akimaru to be way more than a just a friend or a buddy or some helpmate. He needs strength. He needs more. He needs Akimaru to be his own person, and he's been taking Akimaru apart since they were born.

 

 

 

 

"Tired? Huh? You want a break?"

Akimaru looks at him with the reddened eyes of a deeply exhausted man. Haruna's pretty exhausted himself, but not enough to stop talking, stop goading, stop gloating. 

"Do you ever think maybe you don't work hard enough? To be a Jaeger pilot? You know everyone in this room would kill to have your job, right?" Haruna is teasing, mocking, working through Akimaru's defences. The cadets around them stir restlessly.

Akimaru is teeth-gritted. The man is sweet as candy deep down, but he gives good game face, on the sparring floor anyway. Or it may be he's just too tired to smile. "What about our Drift?" Barely dodges a massive leap and parries the kick to his belly, pushing back against Haruna's leg. Spins away. They circle each other once more.

"What about it?" Haruna's fists up, ready to break bone if Akimaru loses concentration for a scant second.

Akimaru doesn't. "Our Drift is the work of my lifetime of attending to you, Haruna Motoki." 

Blocks a punch with his arms crossed, ducks a swipe to his head, stumbles a bit but not enough for Haruna to take advantage of, now now. 

Late in the game. Exhaustion a sentry. Surrender oncoming. 

 

 

 

Kissing in the dark. It doesn't happen that often. Only in the simulated Drift, dreams and nightmares. The land of Freud and the ghosts of kaiju and space aliens in baseball caps.

"When I'm Drifting with you, I can do anything. I can defeat any kaiju. I can save everyone. You don't feel that?"

"Not for myself." Akimaru's six years old again, more eyes than face. Screwing his tiny features up at Haruna. "I don't think you understand the ordinary man," he pipes. "How beset by uncertainty we are. How disappointed we are."

Now Akimaru's a man again. They're at the bottom of the ocean. Haruna strokes Akimaru's temple, his high, flat cheekbone and pasty skin. "You really think it's hopeless."

It's so dark, where no light can reach, that they are just shadows. "I don't know. Because sometimes I look at you, and I think you really can do it, you crazy bastard. And sometimes I look at you and I'm so sure that you'll be dead."

He presses a finger to Akimaru's lips, soft like velvet, feeling unspeakably sad. "Worth it to stop them, though."

"But I'm scared…"

They press their foreheads together. Twined together like ivy. Just another deep sea-creature, moulting. "Me too." 

 

 

 

 

"I want… I want to turn you into a God." Harder to do than it sounds. How do you turn an ordinary man into something divine?

Especially when he's convinced of his own mortality, like most men.

"The training. There's more to do. That whole right side of the Jaeger isn't being used properly. And the fight strategies. You just follow mine, don't you?"

Akimaru looks like one who is forced to stay, but tormented every moment. "Haruna, stop. I can't be like you. You're like… insane. I've tried. I just don't have it in me."

"Haven't you ever believed in anything, and worked for it?" He taps Akimaru's cheek, smiling. "Would it make you feel any different if I said that I believe in you?"

Akimaru dimples right under his finger like Haruna's waiting for. "I don't know yet."

 

 

 

 

There's hope, there's despair, there's a lot of things. They try their best. Maybe Akimaru's the ordinary part of Haruna's soul. The human element.

Something allegorical.

In the end, Akimaru leaves. To find whatever it is out there that might induce him to return to Haruna. That might bring him resurrected back, less human, more divine. 

Or it's that he's doing the merciful thing, to allow Haruna to give up, finally.

Haruna doesn't know how to do that, though. Akimaru doesn't leave him a manual on it before he goes. The Book of Haruna.

 

 

 

 

And it's six months. 

Six months of his friends on the base. Six months of retraining, helping rebuild a Jaeger, updated and tougher than ever.

Of fighting with the government about their idiotic idea to build Anti-Kaiju defense wall across Ground Zero, the bay of Osaka. Using his celebrity status to some productive use in this darker world.

Of quietly having his affections for Miyashita crushed by the fact that she's been happily dating Ookawa, even though he's old and fat and Haruna's, well, Haruna. It turns out there is at least one woman in this world who isn't moved by that. Life is paralysingly unfair. 

Of analysing kaiju remains and see if a dead kaiju can hold the keys to humanity's future. Six angry months of watching kaiju rise from the ocean and be beaten back.

Six quietly terrifying months. The scary hope that perhaps Akimaru will come back. The world at large assumes he's dead. There's not much Haruna can do. But wait.

 

 

 

Six Drift-less months. 

Haruna doesn't display a single sign of neural illness. It's a huge relief after his previous terrifying experiences. 

But then there's something like withdrawal. A constant hunger than nothing seems to satisfy. His brain, scrabbling for chemicals.

Describe a dream like Wufei's dream here.

And the dreams: waking dreams where Akimaru is right next to him, just that Haruna can't see him. Haruna dashes out of his bed and yells at the mechanics team for not telling him that Akimaru is back already, except Akimaru's not back. They are all happy to assume it was a mistake. This time.

Then, nightmares, certainity that Akimaru is lying dead in an icefield somewhere. It is his ghost, drawn back to the fire of Haruna's mind. Haruna, Haruna. Motoki. It's me. You haven't forgotten me, right? 

 

 

 

"The first Jaeger pilots didn't live long enough for the long-term effects of the Drift to ever be studied: we scientists were more concerned with the immediate problem of stopping the apocalypse." 

Doctor Momoe is an unknown, an arch and reptile-eyed eyed older doctor. She is looking at him with an expression that could be anything from clinical interest to well-concealed trepidation. "I'm sure you're familiar with this next part. The second wave of Jaeger pilots experienced symptoms of nuclear exposure: bleeding, blackouts, neural collapse."

"I've been fine," Haruna exclaims. "Completely fine. I know how to recognise neural collapse, my mind's fine. My Drift was always… really smooth." That was one way of describing it, that, that.

"But," and now Momoe looks positively scary. "We have never studied how the Drift could change your mind, especially long-term repeated Drifting. We've never had the models, the subjects, or the time. Do the neurons of the two minds stop being able functioning without each other? Especially if, perhaps, you spend a lot of time in Drift simulators, with the same partner. Yes, that sounds familiar, doesn't it."

Haruna knows the guilt is scribbled all over his face. 

 

 

 

Commencing Neural Handshake. One. Two. Three. Commencing Drift. Drift established.

Kissing in the dark because it was just their minds and they could do anything.

Baseball games that go on for thirty innings, each play redacted and reacted. The balls lying outside the stadium. The cheering fans. The sun heavy as an egg in the sky. The team calling time outs. Injuries. Double plays. Steals. Bunts. Every blade of grass growing in its proper time.

Years of adventures on a moon of their own making.

Centuries of battling down in the secret birthing places of the kaiju. (Akimaru is still a crappy pilot even in their dreams.) 

Lying around doing nothing much except holding hands and grinning at each other. Wallowing in the deep feeling of comfort of the shared Drift. 

You can sink and sink for a whole lifetime and every moment feels unique.

 

 

"It's not like a physical connection, it's not like sex. The body can grow desentisied to physical sensation. It's in the mind." Momoe looks like she can read the guilt off his head. "So, what happens to the mind when you deprive it of that artificial injection of belonging?"

Haruna feels sick. "I think I'm finding out."

 

 

 

And one dark, stormy summer day, Haruna is especially pissed and even Kaguyan is avoiding him. 

He's spent half the day training and is going to spend the other half helping the maintenance team with their half-built Jaeger, gleaming wetly with promise in the engine room. There isn't a single hand to spare, and the manual labour keeps him busy enough to make him forget his anger at the world, at his own lack of Jaeger, at the kaiju for existing and killing people all the time.

Akimaru just appears in the doorway of Haruna's room. 

Haruna is thinking about five million other things and nearly shoves him out of the way. "Where did you come from?" Haruna asks stupidly. He hasn't had any of those dreams since he's been taking the brain pills. Unless he really is having a mental breakdown. 

Akimaru points upwards, beatific. "The moon."

His glasses are different. It is such a stupid detail to fixate on, but there it goes. Square glasses. Estrangement. Akimaru is smirking at him. He has a bit of a tan over the pale pink of memory, and cracked lips. Haruna has no idea what the man had been up to for the past half a year. For all he knows, fighting aliens on the moon.

Turns out it doesn't matter.

Haruna puts down his bag of nuts and bolts and pulls him in by the shoulders. Akimaru looks him over without much surprise. Haruna probably has some engine grease on his cheek. He hasn't washed his hair in ages, not cut it. They are never going to be able to find words for any of this. 

Akimaru hooks a thumb over his shoulder. "I saw the frame." Of the new Jaeger, titanium encased in steel. Their Jaeger. "It looks good." Haruna puts a hand on the side of Akimaru's face just to be able to feel his smile. "Ready to give us another try?"

Haruna swallows, and nods.

 

 

 

"On the Alaskan base." Akimaru has a tiny scar on his chin now, where's that one from? "They're building it. The thing. To stop the kaiju."

"What, an evacuation to the moon?" Haruna teases. It's just the usual scares moles and freckles on his shoulders, but Haruna double checks. It is important to be thorough.

"A… nuclear deterrant, they call it. Though it's less of a deterrant and more of just an actual giant nuclear attack as a means of ending the war, permanently, by sustaining high damage."

"Let me guess, they called it Fat Boy," Haruna says sarcastically, looking up from Akimaru's spine.

"Mrs Scary." 

"Americans. And who will be carrying out this terrible idea?" Akimaru grins enthuastically. Haruna stares at him suspiciously, sitting up for a minute. "You're joking. We'll die."

"But not in vain," Akimaru hums. "But it was more because the last two double events have pretty much destroyed the Jaeger programme. It's getting to last-hour stage." Haruna broods, because this is true. Soon, humanity's time on the planet will be at an end.

"So we blow up the centre of planet and live on the resulting asteroids. Fun."

"The fun part is that these two nerds think the kaiju's home? It's a portal to a different planet. So, we chuck the bomb in, hurry back to Earth, and celebrate over martinis. Maybe you'll finally get a girlfriend."


End file.
